Tips for starting your flooring business from the “floor” up

When starting a flooring business, keeping in touch with any previous customers is of vital importance to ensure long term growth. Studies have shown that a previous customer is much cheaper to attain than a new customer. This becomes a very smart strategy when the economy takes a down turn since people are much more cautious with their money and are more likely to trust someone that they have already dealt with. Just like most other businesses, flooring companies will do much better to take the long term approach by first building reserves of cash and keeping repeat customers. Obviously if your customers are not satisfied then this will be tough to do. Keeping that in mind, it is very important that you are providing quality work for a fair price.

Long Term Focus- Make Friends

Something that we have found very important when initially starting a business is the way that you establish relationships with the people that will be able to help you grow in the future. If you plan to oversee and install every floor on your own then you can keep your standards high but you will be limited on the amount of growth that you can see. You will hit a ceiling pretty quickly if you need to be on every job that comes in. There comes a point when you will absolutely need to either hire a crew or farm out some of the jobs that come in for your company. This goes back to forming relationships. Finding installers that you can trust that are not the entrepreneurial type will be a great thing to have so keep yourself open to meeting people in the industry. Anyone that you hire or subcontract will be representing your company so be certain to check their portfolio of work and ensure that they are properly trained and act in a professional and courteous way.

Take a trip to local distributors and or wholesalers in your area. You would be shocked by how just the smallest amount of friendliness can make all the difference in the world when dealing with your suppliers. This is especially true when dealing with a small local distributor rather than the large scale company. We have heard many reports of our clients that have really gotten nothing short of special treatment from their local wood flooring distributor simply because they took the time to go make friends with the owner and employees. This may also help you to open a line of credit for your business which can help free up cash flow and allow you to take on larger more extensive jobs sooner.

The final tip we will share today has to do with your local real estate agents. We have used this trick with many clients and it has landed them countless jobs simply because of the rapport between the agent and their home buyer clients. The trick is to offer coupons to the agent for a certain amount off your services. This could be a percentage off, a flat fee per square foot or something else like “free upgrade to our high traffic polyurethane” . Doing this is good for you and the agent because they can sell it as a bonus when purchasing a house from them.

Well we hope that you enjoyed the article, if you have any questions please feel free to shoot us a line.